My work explores with immersive and interactive art installations that develop hybrid ecologies using sensors, reactive forms and spaces, natural growing processes, and biological growth systems within the natural world.
Using Art+Science practice as a platform to hack complex social, biological and machine-based intelligences illuminates and amplifies a complex relationship to our world. That inter-relationship intertwines a beautiful symbiosis, an agency of change, and is the focus of my explorations. These sensorial and immersive experiences, informed by AI/Deep-Learning, Cultural Data, Biology, and Technology, have as an ultimate goal to see as an emergent world sees, the connection between the behavior of unseen biological processes/systems matched to the modeling of intentional communities.
Together with these more connective and external approaches of my 3D interactive work, my drawing practice continues to aim for more intimate questions. I still strive to draw passionately and expressively (especially in the Portraits) however, most of the drawings act as an organizer of sorts. An experiment, a reflection, an understanding, these drawings are the remnants of exploration into a possible future. I’m trying to interrogate connections within and comparing them to an active relationship with the world.
When the drawing process is working, I’m reveling in learning. See in the work a foundation of Experimentation, Process, Chance, Divergence, Perception, Movement as a Time-based Sensory Input, Contrast, and Interaction. In every piece a curious reflection of natural processes and my connection to them.
If I change the way I imagine, does that change the way that I see? Is that not connection? Can that be Love? Shouldn’t it be?
My work explores with interactive art installations that develop hybrid ecologies using sensors, reactive forms and spaces, natural growing processes, and biological growth systems within the natural world.
Using Art+Science practice as a platform to hack complex social, biological and machine-based intelligences illuminates and amplifies a complex relationship to our world. That inter-relationship intertwines a beautiful symbiosis and an agency of change. My goal is to see as an emergent world sees, rather than preserving self-reflexivity.
Together with these more connective and external approaches of my 3D interactive work , my drawing practice continues to aim for more questions. I still strive to draw passionately and expressively (especially in the Portraits) however, most of the drawings act as an organizer of sorts. An explanation, a reflection, an understanding, these drawings are the remnants of exploration.
I’m trying to interrogate connections within and comparing them to an active relationship with the world. When the drawing process is working, I’m reveling in learning. See in the work a foundation in Experimentation, Process, Chance, Divergence, Perception, Movement as a Time-based sensory input, Contrast, Interaction, in every piece a curious reflection of natural processes and our connection to them.
Every time I look in any direction I am reminded that not one thing I do is something that is one thing I do. It is always something else, someone else, decided somewhere else. This is not a conspiracy. I am as complicit as the someone else. I look and choose just as anyone somewhere other than here. One something else is as else something.
The current body of work represents a questioning of this Else-ness by its variation of media, concern with movement and it’s concentration on inter-subjectivity or points of exchange. It looks into the way we interact with information, specifically, the flow of pre-mediated visual information that envelops us daily as defining terms. To show the visual nature of this structuring flow, I use random imagery culled from a variety of media sources. These images, incomplete replications in varying scale, are stacked, repeated, stretched, melded, transferred onto a variety of forms that act as a vessel for projected information – in it’s ever changing forms, mediations and politicized agendas – to flow through, filling momentarily, dissipating, and then, quickly repeating the cycle. This constant cycling forces the body to activate in a movement towards a muted, fragmented and formless multiplication.
Since they are more spatial and thus more concerned with a literal and felt interchange, I have been working of late in Sculpture, Installation, and Video Projection. For these works, it is not important that any of the images are understood individually, but rather together as an untouchable movement. Imagery, or the information that it imparts, should be viewed then, not as a holder of individual meaning, but instead as a precursor or enforcer of Else-ness
.Even as I experiment with the spatiality of movement, I still retain a love and practice of drawing as a means of direct exploration. Contemporaneously to my more 3-D work, there is a constant consideration of mark-making in my drawings. I explore drawing as both the mark I make and the mark made upon me. I am intrigued by how – through this direct point of contact (a sense of touch rather than sight) – there is such equivocation between art and life. In the actuality of the media, there is an endless array of points and paths between self and society, active and passive, percept and precept, impulse and recognition. Rather than answering, drawing is the way I develop my questions.
All of these artistic explorations, whether they be a felt interchange of information or the directness and touch of drawing, aim to clarify my role in a culture that, as I understand it now, would prefer I had no role. It would, instead, keep me moving, translucent, malleable, unable to touch and forever in search of an Else.
Curtis Bracher. All rights reserved ©